#defeat DeSantis

[shadowdemon-gd]

I don’t get how anyone can like Ron DeSantis. There’s nothing good about him. I don’t use the words fascist or Nazi lightly. They’re very extreme words and they get thrown around way too much. But when you see things like him blaming a Jewish guy for Trump’s indictment, his desire to erase LGBTQ+ and black history, his inaction against racism and antisemitism, his use of his political power to silence his critics, his apathy when his citizens are in danger, him lying to make himself look good (he said no books were banned when they were), him saying he’ll destroy “wokeism” (how he defines left-wing ideas or equality), him changing his views to get support (he disavowed the corona vaccine even though he previously supported it so he’ll get more far-right support), his use of propaganda and misinformation (called gender-affirming care for minors cutting off their privates), and so much other bad stuff that I can’t think of that’ll make this lost go on forever, the truth is clear. I’m not exaggerating or being hyperbolic when I say this: Ron DeSantis is a Nazi

[superbeans89]

And thank fuck for that

[tomorrowusa]

To disempower hatred and bigotry, vote in large numbers to toss Republicans out of office and to keep them out of power.

It may take 6 to 8 years to complete the project and we must remain permanently on guard thereafter. But the anti-abortion fanatics fought for 49 years to overturn Roe v. Wade. If we wish to win then we need to have long attention spans, make more friends than enemies, and not get bogged down in internal disputes.

Victory is a process rather than a Finish Line.

[petrenocka]

When you culture war so much, American Culture itself goes after you.

[uchatspice]

https://rumble.com/v481bl3-u-chat-spice-ep.-21.html

[microcosmtoxin]

election good news

in delaware, sarah mcbride became the first openly trans person to be elected to the us congress

in north carolina, democrat josh stein will defeat self proclaimed "black nazi" and "pervert" mark robinson for the governorship

new york, maryland, and colorado all added reproductive right protections to their state constitution through a vote on an amendment

for the first time in history, two black women will serve in the senate, newly elected lisa blunt rochester (de) and angela alsobrooks (md)

kentucky rejected a constitutional amendment which would undermine public education by forcing public school dollars to go to non-public school

former democratic states attorney of florida monique worrell won her job back after ron desantis forced her out

palestine supporter bernie sanders won his fourth term in the senate representing vermont

despite fears, there have been no reports of any political violence or widescale voter intimidation and fraud

you will still wake up tomorrow

[centrally-unplanned]

A bonus pre-election thought as I post my way through this week: there is one strain of Trump supporter I will call the "policy gamble Republican". They think Trump is a moron and a shitheel, and generally do not think Kamala Harris is worse in any way on things like character - they know all those arguments are bullshit. Instead, they are just coolly looking at the expected policy outcomes for each and think it comes out Trump.

They focus on markets and tend to be libertarian types - oh sure Trump says that he will do the tariff thing, but he won't, Republicans will back him off that ledge. And meanwhile Harris will continue to double down on the nanny state, and do "price controls", woke DEI stuff, etc. "Given the exponential returns of long-run GDP growth a 1.3% reduction in GDP today is worth approximately 200,000 babies in 2100" type stuff; the kind of people who argue Bush was Good, Actually, because PEPFAR saved more lives than the Iraq War killed.

And I do get this argument, I am mocking them affectionately here - there is valuable policy analysis to be done like this, it isn't a crazy instinct. Obviously to me, my first objection is just "the 5% or higher chance of authoritarian backsliding is not worth any of that", and I think that does carry the day. But there is a second point, which is that they treat the election itself as bloodless vis a vis the wider political currents. That if the Republicans win or the Democrats win that means one of them is in charge, but it won't change the underlying parties and they repeat next year.

I think they don't realize they are making this assumption since when you spell it out like that it comes off as quite naive. When Trump won in 2016 it broke both political parties in the US - the Republican party spiraled into nativist, anti-trade platforms, while the Democrats fought a huge culture war over things like whether America was Irredeemably Racist or if economic populism would carry the day. And as much as people tend to forget it today, losing in 2020 - and Trump's behavior afterward - got quite close to breaking his hold on the party. Honestly he got absurdly lucky, with Biden being such a deeply unpopular president and his challengers coalescing around Ron DeSantis who turned out to be incredibly mid.

It isn't predictable or formulaic ofc, but all of this is to say that Trump winning is very likely to consolidate and expand his hold on the Republican Party, which if you are a libertarian-esque market type is an awful outcome for you. Trump actively endorses anti-market populists for down-ballot elections! The "Free Trade Center" isn't gonna hold forever in the face of someone who keeps winning. And meanwhile his defeat will likely have a positive impact on making the Republican party saner. He is certainly an electoral liability for the cause if you want it to be empowered!

So yeah, independent of any policy bills or actions, elections themselves are important events that shape political culture. I would value that over a good number of specific reforms of this or that market regulation in any EV calculation.

Not the Jones Act though. Fuck the Jones Act.

[qqueenofhades]

I love your essays; they are fascinating. Thank you for sharing your perspective! I have a follow up question, if you have the time or energy: in your last, you said, “It's a blueprint for a tiny group of extreme right-wing theocrats and fascists to get their way regardless of what the broader public says about it…”. Who ARE the tiny group of extreme right wing theocrats and fascists? Is it the politicians whom we see all over the news, like Vance and Boebert ands Haley and DeSantis? Or are they puppets whose strings are being pulled by donors behind the scenes, like…I don’t know, the Koch brothers and the Uleins (sp?)? I feel like whoever it is must have mind boggling amounts of money, to overcome the sheer number of people who don’t think like that, even people nominally republican who believe in traditional low taxes and small government, but are not completely bananapants. Or maybe that’s why they tagged trump, bc no one before him was willing to act like enough of an outright gangster to seriously move the needle…? How much more rich than disgustingly rich do they need to be?

Perhaps surprisingly, it's fairly easy to identify the Hall of Shame who are busily trying to end American democracy, not least because they have become increasingly open about it. Their motives are diverse but all terrible. The quick rundown is as follows:

First, the alt-right billionaires club such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Harlan Crow, and Leonard Leo (the last two are some of the chief funnelers of dark money to SCOTUS; Crow is Clarence Thomas's sugar daddy). They have reasons ranging from grandiose delusions about "remaking" the world in their preferred image (not at all terrifying) to attaching themselves to fascist politics in order to defeat workers' rights and labor unions, who they view as a threat to their mega-wealth. Thiel is the primary sponsor of JD Vance and the alt-right cryptobros clubs that draw the young right-wing white men who also primarily form the membership of neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups. They want to end democracy in order to punish women, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else who Nazis always hate. Crow and Leo have lavishly funded the corrupt SCOTUS in order to influence their preferred right-wing rulings, and there are undoubtedly more who we don't even know about. This is just the tip of the iceberg and I have no doubt that it's far, far worse than anything that has been publicly reported.

Next are the extremist right-wing interest groups that have cohered around and advocated for Project 2025, which is basically just the conservative-extremist wet dream put in one place and written down. They include the Heritage Foundation (the primary Project 2025 author) the Federalist Society and the John Birch Society of right-wing judges and policymakers, and Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic right-wing influence group who are straight out of a Dan Brown novel but are in fact some of the most consequential and powerful players in MAGA World. Their name means "work of God" in Latin, which is very much what they see themselves as doing, and their reach in DC is vast, particularly in the far-right evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups that have attached themselves to Trump as a vehicle to push through their regressive-reactionary social and cultural politics, especially on abortion, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and other things that they view as "unholy." These are the diehard true believers who really, truly think that it's better for the US to be a fascist theocracy espousing "Right and Moral" religious views than a flawed, pluralist, and secular democracy. Hard Yikes.

Thirdly we have the useful idiots, such as Vance, Ron DeSantis, Boebert, Greene, basically pick-a-Republican-politician-here, who are pursuing fascist politics out of careerism, opportunism, some amount of genuine belief, and exploiting the age-old fissures of American racism, nativism, xenophobia, and other original sins that have dogged the country since its founding. Of course, Trump himself is chief among these useful idiots, because he's completely willing to end American democracy and install himself as Dictator-for-Life if it exempts him from having to face the consequences for all the crimes he did last time (and frankly, his entire life, which is now catching up with him). I don't think Trump has an actual consistent or coherent policy bone in his body; witness how quickly he was willing to flip-flop on the Florida abortion issue depending on what he thought was useful (and then after the backlash he received from his base). He's a malignant narcissistic sociopath who is incapable of complex reasoning and long-term planning. His only and overriding interest is himself, he will do absolutely whatever he has to in order to save himself, and as long as he has his death grip on the GOP, everyone who wants to succeed in the party or even have a future in it has to slavishly kiss Don Corleone Trump's ring. That is why many lifelong Republicans have been breaking ranks to say they will vote for Harris, because "being a Republican's" one and only qualification is now "being utterly loyal to Trump." That's it.

These are all actors based more or less in the US, but we also can't forget the fact that basically the entire Republican Party is in deep, deep hock to Vladimir Putin and other foreign autocrats (but most especially and dangerously Putin). We just had the DOJ indictment of MAGA influencers who were taking Russian black cash by the bucketload in order to spread damaging lies about Biden/Harris and pump for Trump, and this is consistent with Russia's pattern of extensive interference in American elections going back to at least 2016. It is hard to overstate how much Putin hankers to end American democracy for many reasons. He is a former KGB agent trained in the black-and-white us-and-them logic of the Cold War where the US was the USSR's archenemy, his constant mourning for the USSR's collapse has been well documented, and it would be the absolute defining and singular achievement of all of post-imperial Russian history for Putin to effectively end American democracy with a second Trump term.

This is for the simple reason that Trump is utterly in thrall to Putin and will do whatever he asks, whether it's cutting off aid to Ukraine and forcing them to accept annexation by Russia, pulling America out of NATO and letting Putin set his invasion sights on Poland and the Baltic states, and anything else. That is genuinely terrifying but very likely if Trump was re-elected, aside from the end of American democracy and the worldwide ramifications it would have to empower fascist authoritarians everywhere. Putin is trying to achieve this through a combination of good old-fashioned Soviet-style dezinformatsiya, paying off MAGA influencers, putting the entire resources of the Russian state into defaming Harris-Walz, and recruiting useful idiots like his asset Jill Stein, who has extensive Russian ties and only pops up every four years for idiot leftists to spoil their vote and ruin Democratic electoral prospects. So. Again. Hard yikes.

So that's the quick rundown of the people who are vested in Trump and Project 2025's success and why, and as you can see, while they're all different, they're all terrible. But yes: that really is a very, very small group of people, relatively speaking. And a vote for anyone except Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is a vote to empower them and also to ensure that you will never have the chance to vote again, due to living in an authoritarian fascist regime. Choose wisely.

[spacelazarwolf]

i looked up the current candidates for the 2024 presidential election in the usa and it is. really fucking bleak.

democrats:

joe biden - current president. doing...ok. he's pro trans rights and has been doing some good stuff to fight climate change, but he's like a hundred years old and

robert f kennedy jr - seems to have decent opinions on a lot of policy, but thinks that chemicals in the water are making kids transgender and has suggested that covid is a conspiracy by ashkenazi jews and chinese people

marianne williamson - anti vaxxer apparently, also i guess thinks love is the only thing that will defeat trump

republicans:

ryan binkley - conservative pastor that thinks marriage is "between one man and one woman", anti choice, wants to Build A Wall

doug burgum - republican governor that has actively passed anti trans legislation, anti regulation (unless what you're regulating is trans people ig????)

chris christie - is apparently opposed to bans on gender affirming care, but vetoed a bill allowing trans people to change their gender marker, anti choice

ron desantis - i feel like i don't need to explain

larry elder - denies systemic racism and wants police to be harder on crime, anti crt and dei, pretty solidly anti trans

nikki haley - anti choice, extremely anti trans, anti immigrant, supports israel while also having an evangelical pastor who has a history of antisemitism and racism and queerphobia open for one of her events

will hurd - doesn't seem too horrendous, not noticeably anti trans, but supports 15 week abortion ban

asa hutchinson - great value brand trump

perry johnson - was republican candidate for governor of michigan but was disqualified due to fraudulent ballot signatures

mike pence - yeah

vivek ramaswamy - "anti wokeism", would pass a law requiring teachers to disclose to parents if they found out their kid is trans, supports bans on gender affirming care, wants to end sanctuary cities and address mental health through "faith based approaches", hedge fund bro

tim scott - said that america is not a racist country and the biggest problem facing black people is "fatherlessness incentivized by welfare", opposes same sex marriage and gender affirming care and thinks democrats are using school to "indoctrinate children"

corey stapleton - montana secretary of state, couldn't find much abt him

donald trump - donald trump

independent

cornel west (green party) - seems really cool actually but two party system will fuck him over

i hate the two party system so much!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

also congrats to the dems for yet another milquetoast kennedy, and congrats to the republicans for having the most racially diverse list of racist and transphobic candidates!!!

[transfloridaresources]

Today (05/06/24), 4:30pm, Orlando

[Photo ID: Pink to white gradient image with various logos and info boxes. Text reads: 'Save the date: May 6th 4:30pm. Press Conference. 5205 South Orange Avenue - Orlando, FL 32809. Not one step back! Identification for all! Not one step back. Every Floridian. Every Identity. Every ID.' Logos for Orlando for Gender Equality, Free Mom Hugs, Inc., Dream Defenders, Zebra Youth, Come Out with Pride Orlando, HRC Orlando / Central Florida, Spektrum Health, The Center Orlando, GLSEN Central Florida, HOPE CC. /End ID]

[Photo ID: White box with rainbow border. Text reads: 'Statement on DMV Policy Change. LGBTQ+ advocates from around the state organized and mobilized in great numbers this past legislative session. Through actions like protests, letter-writings, die-ins, and more, we defeated 21 out of 22 anti-LGBTQ+ bills attempting to move through the Florida legislature. One of these bills, HB 1639, sponsored by local representative Doug Bankson, was particularly egregious. It sought to redefine "sex" in a way that excludes transgender, non-binary, and intersex people, and to prohibit a person's state identification documents from reflecting their gender identity. As the bill was heading towards its downfall in the legislature, the Deputy Executive Director, Robert Kynoch, of the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) released a memo to county tax collectors in late January rescinding previous department policy (IR08 - Gender Requirements), which allowed for Florida residents to change the gender marker on their ID to accurately reflect their gender identity. The memo wrongly excludes gender identity from "sex" in an effort to subvert the democratic process to redefine sex - and prohibit gender marker amendments - absent legislative authority. In a similar way, the legislature continued its attacks on the rights of immigrants and people experiencing homelessness in the form of HB 1451. This bill, which passed and was signed into law by DeSantis, restricts the acceptance of community IDs issued by community organizations to immigrants and individuals experiencing homelessness. Community IDs are essential for demonstrating that a person is a resident and member of a given community. It is already tremendously difficult for these groups to acquire valid identification, and this law imposes yet another barrier to identification.' /End ID]

[Photo ID: White box with rainbow border. Text reads: 'Statement on DMV Policy Change. Accurate identification is a human right; we must demand access to legal authenticity for all. Advocates for transgender individuals, immigrants, and people experiencing homelessness must stand together in the fight for equitable access to accurate identification. We demand that the FLHSMV restore their previous IR08-Gender Requirements policy to ensure that transgender people can obtain accurate IDs. Furthermore, we demand that legislatures take action to protect trans people's ability to obtain accurate identification as well as protect the acceptance of community IDs. Join us for a rally and press conference at SPEKTRUM Health (5205 South Orange Avenue) on May 6th at 4:30pm! WE CANNOT LET THEM TAKE US ONE STEP BACK! Signed, Orlando for Gender Equality, GLSEN Central Florida, HRC Orlando/Central Florida, SPEKTRUM Health, HOPE CC, PRISM, Zebra Youth, Youth Action Fund, Central Floridians for Social Equality, Justice Advocacy Network, Voices of Florida Fund/Women's Voices of Southwest Florida, UCF Students for a Democratic Society, Central Florida Queers for Palestine, LGBT+ Center Orlando, Inc., Come Out with Pride, Free Mom Hugs, Inc., Dream Defenders, Corey Hill, Vance Ahrens, candidate State Senate District 19, Amy Phillips, Beverly Washington, Orlando Drag Queen.' /End ID]

[shadowdemon-gd]

This is the bravest thing I’ve ever seen

[mariacallous]

This is from January of 2024.

For years, the death penalty in the United States appeared to be on an irreversible decline, perhaps even headed to extinction. Death sentences have fallen by about 90 percent since their mid-1990s peak, when more than 300 were imposed every year. In 1999, there were almost 100 executions nationwide; in 2021, there were 11.

That downward trend is beginning to reverse. Driven by hardline prosecutors and tough-on-crime governors, the number of executions jumped 64 percent in 2022 and increased again in 2023 to a total of 24, the highest in five years.

Perhaps the most crucial player in the death penalty’s resurrection, though, is the U.S. Supreme Court, whose historic role of maintaining guardrails has given way to removing roadblocks. Under the conservative supermajority put in place by President Donald Trump, the justices are far more likely to propel an execution forward than intercede to stop it, including in cases where guilt is in doubt or where the means of carrying it out could result in a grotesque spectacle of pain and suffering.

States are responding. On Thursday, Alabama is scheduled to execute someone using a potentially dangerous method that has never before been used in the U.S. South Carolina announced it is restarting executions after a 12-year pause, a decision which is now the subject of a legal challenge that will be heard by the state’s highest court in February. On Dec. 22, a Utah judge ruled that the state could use a firing squad to execute Ralph Leroy Menzies, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1988, even though past experiments with this method demonstrated that there was a “risk of a ‘botched’ execution, such as bullets missing the target placed over a person’s heart.” Earlier in 2023, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed six death warrants (compared to just two during his entire first term in office) and a law that ended a unanimous jury requirement for death sentencing. Florida also enacted a law that allows capital punishment in cases involving sex crimes against children in non-lethal cases; in December, a Florida prosecutor invoked it to seek the death penalty against a man accused of multiple counts of sexual battery against a child under the age of 12. The law flatly contradicts a line of Supreme Court precedent barring the death penalty in cases where “no life was taken.” DeSantis has vowed to defend the legislation against any legal challenge, offering the justices an opportunity to reconsider an entire line of death penalty jurisprudence. Similar laws have been proposed in Tennessee and Missouri.

On Nov. 16, Alabama executed Casey McWhorter, who had just turned 18 when he participated in the 1993 robbery and shooting death of the victim. The jury could not reach a unanimous verdict on the death sentence, but the judge imposed it anyway. In Louisiana, a coalition of prosecutors led by Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry defeated Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards’ effort to commute 56 death row sentences. Landry, a death penalty proponent who has pushed for Louisiana to expand its execution methods to include hangings and firing squads, replaced Edwards as governor in January. “If Jeff Landry wants to do it,” said Cecelia Kappel, the executive director of the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans, “he will find a way to do it.”

So far, the new wave of completed executions has been confined to the deep South. But death penalty sentences are not, and other parts of the country may soon start carrying them out. Between 2001 and 2021, the number of people on death row in Maricopa County, Arizona, increased by more than half. One of the most avid proponents of capital punishment in the country is Mike Hestrin, the district attorney of Riverside County, California, which now has the second-largest population of people on death row — behind only Los Angeles County, which has increased its death row population by 25 percent over the past two decades.

In 1976, the Supreme Court famously declared that “death is different,” and demanded an extra level of scrutiny because a mistake is irreversible. Historically, in particularly troubling instances involving state misconduct or abysmal defense lawyering, the Court sometimes intervened at the eleventh hour — from 2013 to 2023, it stayed an execution just 11 times and vacated stays of execution 18 times, according to Bloomberg Law.

Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her replacement with Amy Coney Barrett in 2020, the Court has stopped an execution only twice and reversed a lower court to permit an execution nine times. In 2023, 26 condemned prisoners asked the Court to hear their cases; 25 were rejected. The message is clear: Prosecutors eager to seek and swiftly impose death sentences can reliably do so without judicial interference.

In the early aughts, the Supreme Court issued a series of rulings that placed bright-line limitations on how prosecutors could use the death penalty, barring the execution of the intellectually disabled defendants in Atkins v. Virginia, and those under the age of 18 in Roper v. Simmons. Neither category of person, the Court said, were as blameworthy as run-of-the-mill defendants, pointing out that most industrialized countries had long since come to the same conclusion. In Roper, the Court was blunt: “It is fair to say that the United States now stands alone in a world that has turned its face against the juvenile death penalty.”

But in 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed course and started on its current path. In Bucklew v. Precythe, a majority of the court opined that the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment “does not guarantee a prisoner a painless death — something that, of course, isn’t guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.” In the court’s reasoning, the excruciating pain the defendant might suffer during execution paled in comparison with the terror and mayhem he inflicted during his crimes.

In that same opinion, the Court indicated an impatience with pausing executions while it considered whether to hear the underlying claims from appellate attorneys. Justice Neil Gorsuch warned his colleagues to be skeptical when reading eleventh hour death row appeals: “Last minute stays should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”

It has been. Consider the 13 federal prisoners who were sent to the death chamber in the final months of Trump’s presidency. In a series of terse orders, issued without briefing, argument or public airing of the legal issues, the court blessed the rushed, furious pace. Using this opaque process, which legal scholars call the “shadow docket,” the justices erased lower-court injunctions against executions in seven cases and turned away last-minute requests for stays in the other six. During the 16 years in which Barack Obama and George W. Bush occupied the White House, the Court had invoked the shadow docket to rule for the government a total of four times and “never in a death penalty case,” according to Stephen Vladeck, a professor at the University of Texas School of Law. In Trump’s single term in office, the number jumped to 28, including non-capital cases.

More recently, the Court has rejected cases that advocates say are riddled with error or rest on shaky evidence. On Oct. 2, the Court declined to consider the capital case of Robert Leslie Roberson III, whose conviction is based on dubious “shaken baby syndrome” science. Roberson will likely soon have an execution date. The same day, the justices also declined to hear the case of Toforest Johnson, who was convicted of murdering a law enforcement officer based on the testimony of a woman who was paid $5,000 by police in exchange for her testimony that she overheard him confessing — a payment that was hidden from Johnson and the jurors.

On Oct. 30, the Court turned away an appeal from Brent Brewer, whose death sentence for a 1990 homicide in Amarillo, Texas, hinged on testimony from a discredited forensic psychiatrist who said he would be a permanent danger in prison. Texas executed Brewer on Nov. 9. Two more people — McWhorter and a Texas man named David Renteria — were both executed on Nov. 16 after the justices declined to intervene.

Emboldened by the green light from the Supreme Court — along with lower federal courts following its lead — the states have gotten creative.

A major factor in the decade-plus drop in executions that preceded the recent upswing was an inability by states to secure the drugs necessary to follow a well-established and legally sanctioned three-drug injection protocol. The supply of sodium thiopental, the drug meant to send the condemned into a coma before the others were administered, dried up. Some states started using midazolam instead, which is not as effective. The change resulted in high-profile, botched executions with prisoners bucking against their restraints, screaming in pain and remaining alive for hours or even surviving the procedure. Anti-capital punishment advocates hoped that these gruesome spectacles would quell further executions.

But the Supreme Court has made it clear that the states can experiment with alternative methods, and they continue to do so. Alabama’s attorney general is moving forward with plans to execute Kenneth Eugene Smith with nitrogen hypoxia, a never-before-used method that kills people by depriving them of oxygen. The state claims it is painless, but experts disagree. “We do not even reserve this fate for cats and dogs,” wrote Columbia Law professor Bernard Harcourt in a New York Times op-ed, noting that veterinarians stopped the practice in 2020 after studies showed “those animals may experience panic, pain and severe physical distress before dying.”

Smith’s spiritual advisor, the Rev. Jeff Hood, had to sign a release acknowledging that his safety would be at risk if he were to inhale the gas because the hose dislodged or Smith’s face mask came loose. Hood, who has administered last rites inside the death chambers of Texas and Oklahoma told NPR, “There is no doubt in my mind that Alabama is the most ill-prepared, unprofessional execution squad that exists of those three.” (Alabama spent four hours trying to execute Smith by lethal injection in 2022 only to give up after failing to find a suitable vein.)

Oklahoma officials have also expressed a willingness to use nitrogen hypoxia depending on how it fares in Alabama. “The U.S. Supreme Court’s execute-them-at-any-cost mentality has clearly had an effect on the extremist states that want to carry out executions,” said Robert Dunham, the director of the Death Penalty Project at Temple University Beasley School of Law.

The Supreme Court’s recent decisions have created a permissive structure, but not a porous one. Death penalty cases are notoriously rife with racism, questions of innocence, mental health of the accused and whether they received competent legal counsel. Sometimes the facts are too dire for courts to ignore, and even some pro-death penalty politicians are unwilling to take actions in flagrant violation of established norms. The total number of executions over the past decade is still a fraction of its peak in the 1990s.

And yet, the death penalty machine continues to crank on. These days, the battles over who lives and who dies are increasingly local — waged courtroom by courtroom because the Supreme Court has largely abdicated its decades long role as the final arbiter.

“It is becoming more and more clear that the Court is reluctant to interfere in state court cases even to enforce its own precedent,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “They are saying, ‘This is not our problem to deal with.’”

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Matt Gertz at MMFA:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s impending move to crash out of the presidential race and endorse Donald Trump is fitting given that his bid was a cynical and transparent right-wing media operation intended to help return the former president to the White House.   Kennedy, a notorious anti-vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist, plans to end his independent presidential campaign and throw his support to Trump, perhaps at a planned event on Friday, NBC News first reported. The apparent move followed reports that Kennedy was seeking a major administration job from Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris in exchange for his endorsement.

Right-wing media stars who want Trump to win the presidency were among the most fervent supporters of Kennedy’s bid. They encouraged him to run for the Democratic nomination, touted his campaign after it launched, then urged him to run as an independent when they thought he would take votes away from that party’s standard-bearer. But they turned on him as it became increasingly clear that his run was actually hurting Trump.

History’s most obvious political rat-fucking attempt is now coming to an end, but its impact on the 2024 race reflects the broader ongoing right-wing turn against vaccinations since the COVID-19 pandemic. And it could still have even more disastrous consequences if Trump’s right-wing media supporters get their way and Kennedy snags a position running a federal health care agency in a second Trump administration.

A right-wing plot to put a “chaos agent” in the Democratic field

Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show was a launchpad for Republican extremists seeking the GOP kingmaker’s support in their election bids. But on the night of April 19, 2023, the candidate receiving plaudits from the Fox star was ostensibly seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.  “Bobby Kennedy is one of the most remarkable people we have met and we are honored to have him on our show tonight,” Carlson told his viewers at the top of their fawning interview. Kennedy’s friendly sit-down with Carlson was characteristic of the glowing treatment he received from right-wing outlets and influencers for the Democratic run he had officially announced earlier that day. His bid drew fervent praise from the likes of Trumpist political operative Charlie Kirk and arch-conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and he became a constant presence on right-wing cable outlets and podcasts. In the early months of his campaign, Kennedy received more Fox weekday appearances than high-profile Republican presidential candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and more mentions on that network than all but three members of that field.

It’s no secret why avowed right-wingers were so interested in Kennedy’s Democratic presidential bid — they thought he could be a spoiler who would help Trump win. Indeed, Steve Bannon, a former Trump White House adviser who had spent years using his streaming show to promote Kennedy’s anti-vax conspiracy theories, reportedly encouraged him to launch the run because he viewed Kennedy as “a useful chaos agent.” Other current and former Trump advisers also talked up Kennedy’s campaign and were not shy about why they were doing so: As Roger Stone put it, Kennedy would “soften Joe Biden up for his defeat by Donald Trump.”

Kennedy was a bad fit for a Democratic campaign. He has one of the party’s most celebrated names, and played a leading role in environmental organizations earlier in his career. But in recent years, he became better known for promoting conspiracy theories about childhood vaccinations, and his extremist views on the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine put him in step with the right-wing propaganda machine. As a candidate, Kennedy thrilled white supremacists by claiming that the virus had been “ethnically targeted” to not affect Jewish people. Kennedy’s positioning made him a better fit for MAGA voters than Democrats. So when he failed to gain traction in the Democratic race and switched to an independent run in the fall, he immediately became a thorn in Trump’s side.

[...]

An anti-vaxxer running HHS?

Kennedy’s campaign had reportedly been trying to secure him a future administration position in exchange for his endorsement. His efforts to meet with Harris to discuss such a deal went nowhere. But Kennedy found Trump more amenable to such a deal. Kennedy reached out to Trump following the July assassination attempt on the former president, using a phone number reportedly provided by Carlson. The pair reportedly talked about Kennedy “about endorsing his campaign and taking a job in a second Trump administration, overseeing a portfolio of health and medical issues.” Kennedy subsequently told The Washington Post he is “willing to talk to anybody from either political party who wants to talk about children’s health and how to end the chronic disease epidemic.”

Trump has since publicly floated giving Kennedy a major job in his administration, telling CNN he “probably would” consider such an appointment. It’s unclear what such a job might look like, and Trump is such a huge liar you’d have to have brainworms to trust him to hold up his end of such a bargain. But Donald Trump Jr. has said of Kennedy, “I love the idea of giving him some sort of role in a three-letter agency and letting him blow it up.” And Trump’s media supporters have proposed offering Kennedy a position as prominent as secretary of health and human services, with Paul Dans, the former director of Project 2025, suggesting Kennedy should head that department, the Food and Drug Administration, or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in order “to really clear house at the agency.”

Granting Kennedy control of HHS and its $1.5 trillion budget, or one of the “three-letter agencies” it oversees, like the FDA or CDC or the National Institutes of Health, could have disastrous consequences. As a report on the prospect from NBC News detailed, Kennedy has kooky health views and “has described wanting to dismantle those offices and rebuild them with like-minded fringe figures.” But such a move would serve as the natural culmination of the right-wing media’s campaign against the COVID-19 vaccines developed under Trump and rolled out under Biden. Carlson and his ilk spent years waging war on those lifesaving medications, falsely claiming they were ineffective and inflating claims about their potential side effects. (By driving down support for the vaccines among Republicans, their effort surely led to the deaths of many members of their audiences.)  Thanks to that campaign, Trump was unable to take credit for the COVID-19 vaccines on the campaign trail. The former president shied away from discussing his administration’s greatest accomplishment to avoid alienating his own supporters during the GOP primary. He’s tried to court Kennedy’s endorsement by talking down childhood vaccinations, bizarrely telling him in a leaked phone call, “I want to do small doses” rather than giving infants a shot that “looks like it’s meant for a horse, not uh, you know, a 10-pound or 20-pound baby.” And on the campaign trail, he’s vowed that his administration “will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate.”

The RFK Jr. campaign was nothing more than a right-wing ploy to help Donald Trump in his quest to gain a 2nd term.

[quotesfrommyreading]

And this was his answer: Help us fight them here, help us defeat them here, and you won’t have to fight them anywhere else. Help us preserve some kind of open, normal society, using our soldiers and not your soldiers. That will help you preserve your open, normal society, and that of others too. Help Ukraine fight Russia now so that no one else has to fight Russia later, and so that harder and more painful choices don’t have to be made down the line.

  —  Zelensky Has an Answer for DeSantis